I woke up once more this morning to yet another  raging argument – this one about Donald Trump’s comments about gun control, Hilary Clinton, and the Second Amendment. Once again, we are offered heat, not light.

My writing is not about politics, yet how can I pretend not to see or hear all of the anguish or hurt and fear, what kind of writer would ignore that and simply take pretty photos in the pasture. Every day I ask myself, “where am I?,” and try to write about it honestly and openly. I can’t run from life, even if I can sometimes avoid it.

Today, I could not avoid it.

Once again, one side says one thing, the other side says the other. We are all left to look inside, not outside, of us for definition, for the moral space, for help in deciding right from wrong, and from a distance.

How, i wonder each day now, do I live outside of argument and anger and insult that passes for dialogue, how do we stay within ourselves and still be faithful citizens of our country and our own world?

We are living in a fascinating time, I have to work to find my center, my peaceful place, to live outside of argument and anger. I believe if I think about it every day, rather than ague every day,  I will become stronger, better, that is the gift of it for me, the pot at the end of the rainbow.

I love peacefulness, but it doesn’t always make me change and grow .In our polarized world, there seem to be no words for “I don’t know” at the moment, but they are perhaps the most important words in my vocabulary. They are, to me, the key to learning and understanding.

I really have no idea what Donald Trump meant to say or didn’t mean to say, or what is in his heart and soul. He lost me a long time ago. Our political leaders, especially our presidents have become carefully programmed and choreographed people, the prevalent idea is they cannot speak freely or spontaneously in our world.

In this sense, they are made to appear less than human, less than real. They are never the people we trust to talk to, only remote figures, representations of people it is very easy – too easy – to hate them. And hate is a poison, it has poisoned our system. We lose sight of the fact that these people are, like us, just people, carrying all of the baggage that people carry.

Donald Trump is a man of the moment,  he defines the very idea of living in the now. He is a spontaneous creature, he is not programmed or choreographed, for better or worse, he does not come from the very mechanical and political world of caution and spin.

He seems to say what comes into his head much of time, and a lot of things come into his head all of the time.

That is said to be a dangerous thing in a political leader of the modern world. Yet this is at the very core of his rise and the reason so many people love him.

Trump has surely said many provocative, false and demonstrably ignorant things, and to me, he is a trafficker in hate and stupidity more than any other single things. I think this will prove his undoing, he is already in the midst of unraveling.

But you each can make up your own minds about what he said  about the Second Amendment and why, there are lots of places for you to go to argue about that, this isn’t one of them. Your guess is every bit as good as mine.

For me, the question is about trust, learning who and what and how to trust.  And how to feel without arguing.

In the end, it will come down to who I trust the most to make the decisions that will shape many of our lives, and the lives of my daughter and granddaughter much more than me.I don’t need to argue, I just need to feel and to trust what I feel. I don’t have to know or pretend to know.

I don’t need to drink of the daily wine of conflict, all I need to do is vote when the time comes. I don’t need to boost the P&L of CNN and Fox News every day.

Hemingway said the best way to find out if you can trust someone is to trust them. Shakespeare wrote that we must love all, trust few and do wrong to no one.

Thomas Merton, a Trappist, poet and author who has inspired me almost all of my life was a man of peace and solitude and contemplation, he loved his hermitage where he often lived in solitude. All of his life, he fought with his bishop, with church authorities, with political and spiritual figures, he wrote hundreds of letters a week, many of them combative. He found for peace and justice and challenged those he felt did not.

He was controversial, the source of much argument. Even in solitude.

Merton also wrote so beautifully about love.

Love was the point, he often wrote.

The beginning of love,  he said, is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, to resolve not to twist others to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not know what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them; we only love the reflection of ourselves that we find in them.

I first found this to be true in my life with dogs and other animals, then found it to be true of people.

This idea, I think, has been one of the most important lessons in my life, and the key to my love for Maria, and I think, her love for me. I wish for her that she be perfectly herself, and in no way a likeness or reflection of me. She could hardly be more different from me that if she stepped out of a spaceship and had a green head.

I feel free to be perfectly myself, and she wishes no more than that from me.

That was, I think, the beginning of love, and also the reason it has survived and grown.

I take this lesson to the outside world. Donald Trump is an easy man for me to dislike, even hate. Our broken political system asks everyone to be perfect reflections of one side, or another side. We demand a likeness or reflection of ourselves, and anything less is an outrage.

I can accept that without living in the world of argument.

How can we possibly come together and exist, let alone love, in that way?

I am no saint any more than Merton was, my list of faults and shortcomings is long and dirty.

I aspire to one thing, I am often another, the people who love me accept that and love me still.The people who can only see me as a reflection of them are gone. They always go away.

This does not mean I can embrace a person like Trump, or love him or vote for  him. People will have to make up their own minds about that, I do not need to persuade anyone of the things I believe.

The moral philosopher Hannah Arendt writes pointedly about people like me, people who usually live in hiding when it comes to what we call political matters. The political and moral significance of things comes out for people like me only in those rare moments in history when things seem to be falling apart, and it doesn’t seem as if the center can hold, when “the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

When everyone is swept away unthinkingly by what others do and believe in, those who wish to think are drawn out of hiding because their refusal to join or speak is conspicuous and thereby becomes a kind of political action all of its own. The faculty of  judging particulars (what does Trump mean or not mean?) is,  says Arendt, the ability to say and know “this is wrong,”  or “this is beautiful,” or “I believe this,” or “I don’t believe that.”

Thinking results in conscience, and conscience tells us what to believe, and from whom to believe it. To trust others, I have to learn to trust myself.

Emmanuel Kant and Arendt, two of the greatest modern philosophers in modern time, wrote frequently of the wind of thought. The wind of thought, wrote Arendt, is not knowledge. It is the ability to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly, generous from cold, loving from hateful.

For me, the ultimate catastrophe is to not know the difference, the wind of thought can prevent that frightening disaster, at least for myself, in those few moments when the chips seem to be down, and we all have to choose between ordinary evil and ordinary good.